Sometimes it all goes horribly wrong

I have the beginnings of a great story of salvaging beer - but right now I'm just at the disaster part.

On Sunday I was making a second batch of my Peanut Butter Porter for Brewtopia - and everything was going poorly.

My new grain mill was making a mess, not cracking some kernels, turning others into flower, and doing it all very very slowly. As you might expect, all the bad milling resulted in a stuck sparger - after an hour I had about 1 gallon of wort. So I ended up having to stir the bucket nearly continuously for 3 hours, leaving me with a very cloudy brew.

I finally finish up at 2:30am, throw the brew kettle in the sink to cool and go to sleep.

At 5:00am something wakes me up. Not knowing why I had woken up I go to answer nature's call, and see a note being slipped under my door. It's from my downstairs neighbor informing me that my shower pipes are leaking onto her ceiling and I need to shut off my water until the plumber arrives.

That's when I see and smell the puddle of wort on the floor - I had left the sparger's tap open, and the mash had become unstuck and leaked a gallon or 2 of wort onto my floor, and apparently onto my neighbor's ceiling. By the time I finished cleaning that up I realized that there was no way to play dumb and let the plumber rip up my floor looking for non-existent leaks, so in the morning I left a note under my neighbor's door apologizing and offering to have her apartment cleaned.

And the final thing? 24 hours after pitching my yeast I see no activity, the surface of the wort is completely still, the yeast was dead. The only other yeasts I've got are Oktoberfest and Hefenweizen - which one of those do you think will make a better porter?

So, it is the beginning of a great beer disaster recovery story - if you want to taste how it ends you'll have to come to brewtopia and try the New York Noble Peanut Butter Porter - or whatever it turns out to be.